Tesla’s Troy Luccketta

Interview and photos by Sayre Berman

“Back in 1987, when I first signed with Tama, I wasn’t all that familiar with their drums,” says Troy Luccketta, who this year celebrates thirty years of touring with the veteran hard-rock band Tesla. “What Tama has done over the last three decades is quite remarkable. From the hardware to the shells and the detail of the design, these [Star series] drums I’m playing now are the finest on the market, hands down.

“When I ordered this kit,” Troy continues, “I got it with 22″ and 24″ bass drums. My buddy Sean Fuller of Florida Georgia Line came over, and I showed him the drums and explained that I had to put a kit together for the Tesla tour. I wasn’t sure yet what a good configuration would be. I left Sean alone with the drums for a while, and when I came back he had it set up in pretty much the way I’m using it today. I later tweaked it to add the 10″ and 13″ rack toms, 16″ and 18″ floor toms on my right, and the 14″ on my left. Sean put the 8″ tom over the hi-hat to my left.”

The rack on Luccketta’s kit was custom-built by famed drum tech John Aldridge. “The rack was designed with aesthetics, ergonomics, and structural considerations at the forefront,” Aldridge says. “Each side of the rack was built with four tubes. The concept was to have all the hardware mounted on the inside tubes and use the outside tubes for additional support. We wanted to make the rack more rigid and also give it a cleaner look from the front. The remaining straight tubes and the four feet on each side were used to beef up the main crash positions.”

It was Luccketta’s idea to position the drums with no mounts visible from the front. Tama’s Super Resonant Mounting System helped make this possible. “We put two L-arms at 45-degree angles so that the mounts on the backside would straddle the snare without interfering with it,” says Aldridge. “We lowered both mounts as far as possible to preserve the floating-tom illusion. The end result is that you can’t see what’s holding up the two toms.”

The remote hi-hat is placed in a particularly unusual spot. “Troy has used a remote hi-hat with a Ching-Ring for a while,” says John. “But it didn’t need to be located where he could reach it. When we got the drums in place, the remote hi-hat fit perfectly in the space underneath the front two toms.”

This is one of the biggest sets Troy has used, and keeping it shallow enough to fit within the allotted stage space required the outer rack ends to be swung slightly forward. “Everything is within reach,” says Luccketta. “I’ve got to stretch pretty far to hit some of the cymbals, but I’m pretty comfortable on it.”